Monday, May 19, 2008

Another busy week has passed and a successful one to boot! Yesterday, Sunday, we held a missionary open-house entitled the "Mormon Experience". We advertised it extensively and had it all set up with 6 different stations for the people attending to visit. The booths were: The Restoration, the Book of Mormon, the Plan of Salvation, Family History and Genealogy, the Holy Temple, and Questions and Answers. We had a huge crowd attend with at least 6 investigators there. It seemed to be a huge success and the Stake President said that he thought that the ward members learned as much as the investigators did. We felt good and plan to do it again. This week we are helping plan and carry out a big Wandsworth STake Dance on Saturday. WE are in the midst of prepartions for that. We are working with our firends, the Perrys, on this project. It should be a huge extravaganza and we hope a big success with lots of people attending. I thought I would mention grocery shopping store possibilities here. There are three big chain stores fairly close by us. Asda is a subsidiary of WalMart. All of the clerks and people that work there wear florescent green shirts and vests as opposed to the blue ones in the USA. They are probably the least expensive of all the stores here. They are very crowded and do not have near the selection of the WalMarts in the States. The most expensive grocery store here is Sainsburys. It is of course my favorite, not because it is the most expensive, but because it has the best qualtiy selections and the help there is very friendly and helpful. The largest grocery store chain is Tesco. We do not shop there very often because they do not like to take American Credit Cards. They make you go through a whole identity check before they will take your card. Most English Credit Cards have a magnetic strip so that they just stick in a scanning machine and they do not have to sign for it. Our American cards have to have a signature and for some reason they are distrustful of that. It seems to be much more secure to me, but what do I know.But the find of a life time. We went to North London with our friends, the Perrys, on Friday. And we found the American Icon, a Costco. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. They have lots of American products and an American atmosphere. It was so great that I included a picture in today's email to prove that we really found one. We bought up a lot of foods that I had not been able to find here before. It was great.We are really excited because we have several visitors coming in the next couple of weeks. Our son, Brice, Nicole, and family, will be here on Sunday. They will be staying for two weeks and we have a busy agenda of places for them to visit. Also, our friends, Glen and Helen Esplin, are coming and will be here for a couple of days with us. The Westbrooks, Doug, Cindy, and Stephanie, will be in London this week. We hope to see them also. It is so much fun to see people from home that we know and love. Well, we continue to stay very busy. This week was a hectic one. We cleaned all of the carpets in the church, helped organize a member's home, made visits to inactives, prepared lessons, planned a library open house, made preparations for the stake dance, fed missionaries and BYU exchange students stationed here in London, did genealogy for ward members, and even slept a little. We hope you are all well and happy. Sounds like summer is coming back home. It is still cool here and a little rainy. The springtime here is surely beautiful. There is green everywhere.